How do you know that the guitarist for Blind Melon is a lawyer? I pose this question to my companion sitting across the table. He shrugs. How? Because he’s checking his work emails during a drum solo. Rogers Stevens lets out a guffaw. As jokes go, this has an audience of one. Thankfully I found it.

Here, I’ll let you in on it. Rogers Stevens is a fourth year associate in the Labor and Employment Group in the Philadelphia office of Ballard Spahr. In 1993 he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as the guitarist for then mega-band Blind Melon. In addition, as part of Blind Melon, Stevens has performed before crowds of several hundred thousand, had an album go quadruple-platinum and reach number three on Billboard, been nominated for two Grammys and opened for the Stones. People having unique careers before telling time in six minute intervals are not uncommon. But few drank champagne on the roof of Capitol Records in Los Angeles to celebrate the signing of a record deal.

For a time, Blind Melon was at the top of the rock music world. The band’s video for its single, “No Rain,” featuring a young girl dancing in a bumble bee costume, owned the MTV airways. It would go on to make VH1’s Top 100 videos of all time. But then, just two years after the Rolling Stone cover, the band’s lead singer, Shannon Hoon, died of a drug overdose at age 28.

Despite their best efforts to carry on, Blind Melon never fully recovered. In 2011, at age 40, Rogers Stevens enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School. What a long strange trip it’s been. And it’s not over. Blind Melon is hard at work on a new album. Sitting at a small table in the bar at the Sofitel in Philadelphia, Rogers Stevens, tall, fit and with a bald head that works well for him, provided a travelogue.

Stevens, after asking the waitress some technical questions about a beer I’ve never heard of [“I’ll take a Yuengling,” I say, embarrassed], doesn’t disappoint as a drinking companion. In a laid back, folksy manner, he gives me the backstory on some of the band’s video shoots, the history of the Blind Melon song I tell him is my favorite and shares some of lead singer Hoon’s insane drug-fueled antics. He then switches seamlessly to something about filing a motion. It’s an unusual pivot. Even da Vinci wasn’t that diverse.

The Bee Girl And The Sting

Rogers Stevens grew up in small town Mississippi, the product of a fundamentalist Christian education. In 1989, not long after graduating from high school, and with just four years of guitar playing under his belt, he headed to Los Angeles. With Stevens in a Honda Civic was boyhood friend Brad Smith. Together they put together Blind Melon, with Smith as bassist, and then recruited Hoon and two others.

Success came quickly. The band’s debut album, “Blind Melon,” came out in September 1992. The album’s early singles didn’t do much. Then, nine months after its release, the Bee Girl showed up. Now, as the cover of Rolling Stone put it, Blind Melon was “ripe and ready.” But Hoon’s death, just eight weeks after the release of its second album, “Soup,” changed everything.

“Soup” is an unusual album. Some of its lyrics are hard to comprehend. Even after listening to it at least fifteen times while on the treadmill, to prepare for my meeting, I was still struggling to figure things out. And I’m not alone. The record is known for this. I tell Stevens the second joke that I wrote for the occasion: what’s the difference between the rule against perpetuities and “Soup?” This one was a softball. “The rule against perpetuities is simple by comparison,” he correctly answers, and then jokes: “People did not understand that record, that’s for sure.”

Following Hoon’s death Blind Melon released “Nico,” containing outtakes and demos and various other tracks. The album was named for Hoon’s daughter who was just thirteen weeks ago when he died. In 1996 Atlantic Records released “Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks,” a tribute album based on the animated TV series, Schoolhouse Rock! Blind Melon, in one of the last recordings made by Hoon, contributed “Three Is a Magic Number.” In 1999 the band called it quits and its members went their separate ways. Stevens went to New York where he was a member of a couple of bands.

“I Had To Make A Change”

Blind Melon reformed in 2006 with a new lead singer and the band released an album. But at the end of 2008, on account of personal problems in the band, Blind Melon once again came to an abrupt end. And that’s when Rogers Stevens’s life changed dramatically. He enrolled in a community college near Philadelphia, having moved to the area to be close to his wife’s family.

“I was on the road in 2008, right at the end of the year, and decided to do this within a couple of days and just enrolled. I’d never been to college,” Stevens explains. “A few weeks later I was sitting in an interpersonal communications class with eighteen year old people; less than half my age. Which was humbling in a way. I just got to put my nose down and grind this out.”

Despite Blind Melon doing well at the time, selling out two thousand seat venues, Stevens said he “had to make a change. I had two kids at home. I couldn’t subject them to that. . . . I was gone for ten months that year. . . . It was not cool to leave for that long, especially for something that was causing all sorts of grief.” [Stevens’s two children, now eight and eleven, never dressed up as a bumble bee for Halloween. I had to ask.]

Penn Law School

Stevens eventually graduated from Temple University and applied to law school. With his father a lawyer this had been his plan from the beginning. He told me he got into several top schools and chose Penn to stay close to home.

The first song Rogers Stevens ever heard Shannon Hoon play was called “Change,” where Hoon – who would have turned 50 two weeks ago -- wrote: “As I sit here in this misery, I don’t think I’ll ever see the sun from here.” I joke if those lyrics ever went through Stevens’s head as he sat in Trusts & Estates at Penn. He laughs.

I mention to Stevens that oft-spoken refrain about not putting anything on social media that you wouldn’t want a school or employer to see. Along those lines, was he concerned that his past Blind Melon lifestyle would hamper his ability to succeed as a lawyer?

I’m not off base with my question. “I was concerned about that,” Stevens admits. “When I started at Penn I went right away to the dean of students. I said ‘I want to talk to you about this. Am I kidding myself? Is anyone going to take me seriously? Are they going to think I’m insane? Is anybody going to hire me? Am I about to waste my money?’” But the dean reassured him: “The world is more forgiving than you think. Times have changed.” And the dean was right. Stevens told me that he received a lot of job offers. But Ballard “felt different than some of the other places. . . . I had connected with people up there.”

Blind Melon again reformed in 2010 and since then has performed nationally and around the world. The band is now far along in the process of making a new album. “It’s a logical progression,” Stevens explained. “We didn’t do anything for ten years and then we made a record in 2008.” The songs are written, Stevens tells me, the demos are together and studio sessions are ongoing. Stevens calls it “the best thing we’ve ever done.”

Reading Employment Contracts: Who Knew?

Any concern that Rogers Stevens’s career as a labor lawyer would stifle him musically did not come to pass. It’s just the opposite. He tells me he’s never played better. And for this, oddly, he points to his new job. “Getting that half of my brain together like I’ve been doing [as a lawyer] it just kind of woke me up in a way musically. Things just make sense to me now. It’s effortless. I used to not have confidence in my playing at all. I always doubted. Am I even any good at this?” Now, Stevens says, “I feel like I can play with anybody.”

I press him for an explanation of this seemingly strange consequence of reading employment contracts. “It’s just a product of being so active mentally all the time in doing this job, especially as a new associate.”

Joining Ballard had another dramatic impact on Stevens. “I lived in a world of chaos before I started this job,” he tells me. “One of the first lessons I learned as a lawyer. Day one, all of a sudden it hit me like a ton a bricks. This is not about me. I lived a fairly self-indulgent life up till that point. And then all of a sudden you realize, this is stuff people really care about and I’m working on it. . . . [M]y interests were not front and center.”

Despite work obligations sometimes forcing Stevens to decline music opportunities, he has been able to juggle the two: “I’ll jump out and go do shows. I go right back into that world and then I come back right into this world. I’ve gotten use to the oscillation.”

In an odd coincidence, in August 2013, at the start of Stevens’s third year at Penn, an Indiana federal court decided Rock v. NCAA. The opinion opens like this: “As Schoolhouse Rock teaches, three is a magic number. Bob Dorough, ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ Schoolhouse Rock, ep. 1 (1973); see also Blind Melon, ‘Three is a Magic Number’ (Atlantic Records 1996).” Perhaps this was a sign from the law gods that Rogers Stevens’s two careers could co-exist.

[Elizabeth Vandenberg, 1L, University of Iowa College of Law, assisted with this article.]